Revolutionary Cause Research Articles

Founders: The People Who Brought You a Nation , and: The Making of the American Republic, 1763–1815 (review)

Founders: The People Who Brought You a Nation. By Ray Raphael. (New York: The New Press, 2009. Pp. 608. Cloth, $35.00.)The Making of the American Republic, 1763-1815. By Paul A. Gilje. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005. Pp. 352. Paper, $53.80.)Reviewed by Ryan PetersenRay Raphael's Founders and Paul Gilje's The Making of the American Republic both cover roughly the same period of early American history. Raphael begins in 1754 with Washington's ill-fated mission to the Ohio country and essentially ends with the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791. As indicated in the title, Gilje's narrative starts approximately a decade later, after the end of the French and Indian War (though he draws on earlier events), and continues through to the conclusion of the War of 1812. Despite the similarity in scope, these are two very different books, with decidedly different approaches, different emphases, and very different target audiences.As with two of his previous books, Raphael once again approaches a familiar subject from a slightly different angle than that usually presented in historical narratives targeted at general audiences.1 Rather than focusing solely on well-known political and military figures, Founders presents Revolutionary America as viewed through the experiences of seven individuals and underscores five themes. Providing something of a representative sample, his cast of characters includes George Washington, Joseph Plumb Martin, Mercy Otis Warren, Robert Morris, Timothy Bigelow, Henry Laurens, and Thomas Young. Throughout the book (and consistent with his earlier work), Raphael focuses on the themes of popular sovereignty, inclusion and exclusion, exchanges of power, constraining authority, and expansion.Though Raphael ostensibly begins in 1754, and the title of his book (at least to this political scientist) seems to convey an emphasis on the events surrounding the Constitutional Convention and ratification debates, he is clearly most interested in the events leading up to and during the Revolutionary War. Sixteen of twenty chapters focus on the period between 1765 and 1783. Events before 1765 are covered in a single chapter, as are both the immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary War and the Constitutional Convention, with one chapter dedicated to each. The final chapter, Lives and Legacies, completes the stories of the seven individuals Raphael follows throughout the book and reflects on their place in the retelling of the Revolutionary story.Continuing in the theme of A People's History and The First American Revolution, Raphael clearly sees class struggle as a key element of the Revolution, and he likes to call attention to both the role of common people and the leveling effect of the within the Revolution on American society. Whether describing the formation of the American Political Society in Worcester, Massachusetts (and its subsequent takeover of the town government), the drafting of the radical Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, or the difficulties faced by pro-Revolution elites as they were forced to come to grips with the democratizing effects of the Revolution, Raphael seems most at home when exploring and emphasizing these themes.Raphael is a fine writer and does an outstanding job of interweaving his themes with the lives of the individuals he follows (as well those immediately surrounding them) into a coherent narrative. Though his book is obviously targeted at a mass audience, Raphael has written a serious history based on extensive research and a reliance on primarysource documents. As popular history, Raphael's book certainly succeeds. His relatively unique approach is such that nonspecialists will learn a great deal about Revolutionary America. Particularly noteworthy is his bringing to light the centrality of Robert Morris to the Revolutionary cause. Even for specialists, Founders warrants attention. While few will encounter any new material on George Washington or Joseph Plumb Martin, many will learn a considerable amount about Henry Laurens, Robert Morris, and Mercy Otis Warren. …

Toward a Fourth Generation of Revolutionary Theory

Third-generation theories of revolution pointed to the structural vulnerabilities of regimes as the basic causes of revolutions. In the last decade, critics of structural theories have argued for the need to incorporate leadership, ideology, and processes of identification with revolutionary movements as key elements in the production of revolution. Analyses of revolutions in developing countries and in communist regimes have further argued for incorporating these factors and for the inadequacy of structural theories to account for these events. Rather than try to develop a list of the “causes” of revolutions, it may be more fruitful for the fourth generation of revolutionary theory to treat revolutions as emergent phenomena, and to start by focusing on factors that cement regime stability. Weakness in those factors then opens the way for revolutionary leadership, ideology, and identification, along with structural factors such as international pressure and elite conflicts, to create revolutions.

Jean-Paul Marat: Médico, científico y revolucionario

Physician, scientist and revolutionary are the biographical aspects that had better summarize the life of Jean-Paul Marat (1743-1793). Due to the role that he played during the French Revolution, his work as a physician and scientist, prior to the events of l789, was forgotten. Marat made important contributions in the area of optics and electricity reflected in numerous publications, as well as translating Newton's Opticks (1787). Well known for his radical and aggressive ideas, his political vocation led him to embrace the revolutionary cause after the events of the Bastille. His figure was not indifferent to his contemporaries; although considered a hero by the poorest citizens, aristocrats and bourgeois considered him a cruel extremist. During the last years of his life, he suffered a cutaneous disease, the diagnosis of which is still a matter of controversy. Proposed diagnoses include eczema, seborrheic dermatitis, scabies and dermatitis herpetica, among others. Marat was assassinated by Charlotte Corday in 1793, becoming a martyr for some segments of the society that worshiped his memory. He was a man with a complex and curious personality whose figure and legacy are still a matter of discussion.

De-facing Rousseau: The Itinerant vergogna in Alfieri's Vita

De-facing Rousseau:The Itinerant vergogna in Alfieri's Vita Chiara Ferrari In his opinions and feelings toward Jean Jacques Rousseau, Vittorio Alfieri showed a deep ambivalence. Some elements are well known, such as Alfieri's refusal to meet him during one of his visits to Paris, or his reading of Rousseau's Confessions and other works. In the Vita (1790-1803), Alfieri writes that he had for Rousseau, "infinita stima [. . .] più assai per il suo carattere puro ed intero e per la di lui sublime e indipendente condotta, che non pe' suoi libri, di cui que' pochi che avea potuti pur leggere mi aveano piuttosto tediato come figli di affettazione e di stento."1 Some studies have pointed to Rousseauian thematic and stylistic influences in the Vita, but none has fully explored the implications of Alfieri's ambivalence for our understanding of the relation between the two autobiographical works.2 To reduce Alfieri's uneasiness to a few biographical anecdotes is to miss the extent to which the frisson is fully played out in the text of the Vita. In this article, I argue that the assimilation of Rousseau in Alfieri's autobiography is not only deeper than acknowledged, but also tied to a resistance toward it—a rejection of what Rousseau represented [End Page 153] in a wider historical sense: the French Revolution. Alfieri was initially sympathetic towards the momentous events unfolding in France, but by the time he put the finishing touches on his autobiography (in 1803) he had became not only vehemently opposed to the revolutionary cause and, by extension, all things French, but also determined to use the Vita as a textual barrier against possible intrusion of egalitarian ideals on future assessments of his legacy.3 Framing my argument necessitates a few remarks about autobiography and particularly the significance of Rousseau's Confessions for Italian autobiography.4 Authenticity is a critical issue for autobiographical writings—and the question is not simply whether the author has told the truth. At stake is the very possibility of constituting the subject through discourse. Paul de Man notes, in "Autobiography as De-facement," that "The interest of autobiography, then, is not that it reveals reliable self-knowledge—it does not—but that it demonstrates in a striking way the impossibility of closure and of totalization (that is the impossibility of coming into being) of all textual systems made up of tropological substitutions."5 Philippe Lejeune's work on autobiography has been influential, particularly among Italian scholars who accept the validity of the so-called "autobiographical pact."6 De Man points out the limitations of Lejeune's approach, in which "the identity of autobiography is not only representational and cognitive, but contractual, grounded not in tropes, but in speech acts."7 This important distinction allows de Man to "reopen" the autobiographical text by making a crucial distinction between the desire for closure that all writers and many critics of autobiography have, and the actual possibility of closure of the text: [End Page 154] Writers of autobiographies as well as writers on autobiographies are obsessed by the need to move from cognition to resolution and to action, from speculative to political and legal authority [. . .] The name on the title page is not the proper name of a subject capable of self-knowledge and understanding, but the signature that gives the contract legal, though by no means epistemological, authority [. . .] The study of autobiography is caught in this double motion, the necessity to escape from the tropology of the subject and the equally inevitable reinscription of this necessity within a specular model of cognition.8 The problem of cognitive speculation and objectivity in the recounting of one's life emerges as a fundamental issue for both secular and religious models of introspection. As Angelica Forti-Lewis has noted, the influence of Rousseau's Confessions reoriented Italian autobiography toward the "introverted" model of exploration of the self. This shift can be seen as a resurfacing of the Augustinian model that Francesco Petrarca had adopted in the Secretum (1342) and a departure from the "extroverted" story of the self in classical tradition that had influenced his epistle, Posteritati (1350), continuing through the current of memorialismo...

Le Capital Amoureux : Imaginary Wealth and Revolution in Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love

AbstractThis paper explores the relationship between revolution and corruption in Jean Genet’s accounts of the Palestinian movement in his final work, Prisoner of Love. For Genet, corruption does not simply expose the actions of a revolutionary subject as an empty impersonation, performed for the actual ends of acquiring personal power and fortune. Rather, it exposes the ‘pretension’ inherent in the revolution it undermines as well as in the accumulation of value (for which the revolution is betrayed). For Genet, the misappropriation of money by the Palestinian leadership makes manifest the imaginary character of both devotion to a revolutionary cause and greed for the commodity-fetish (value). Corruption, in other words, betrays revolution as well as the ‘imaginary wealth and power’ which the ‘game of revolution’ attempts to destroy.

Gilbert Imlay: Citizen of the World (review)

Gilbert Imlay: Citizen of the World. By Wil Verhoeven. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008. Pp. xiii, 299. Cloth: $99.00.)Reviewed Will MackintoshGilbert Imlay was a shadowy figure in the background of the worldremaking events of the late eighteenth century. Born in New Jersey in 1754, he served in the American Revolution, participated in the Kentucky land bubble of the 1780s, dabbled in the slave trade, rose to prominence as a radical author in London in the 1790s, profited in Paris as a purveyor to the French Revolution during the Reign of Terror, and spent three stormy years as Mary Wollstonecraft's wayward lover. As Wil Verhoeven portrays him, he was by no means a major historical figure in his own right, but he moved in exalted circles and had an uncanny ability to be present at major historical crossroads. The common thread in Imlay's life was that he was [i]n many ways a prototype of the American whose mobility allowed him to constantly reinvent himself the murky margins of the Atlantic world (1). Verhoeven's book is the first full-length biography of Imlay, and it carefully illuminates this theme.Verhoeven divides Imlay's life into three epochs. The first section, America, discusses his youth in war-torn Monmouth County, his service in the Continental Army, and his years as a speculator in land and slaves. It was in Kentucky that Imlay first revealed his abilities as a conman and accomplice to the grand schemers and speculators of the era (68). Verhoeven's reconstruction from court records of Imlay's complicated and fraudulent dealings is an archival tour de force. The second section, England, traces Imlay's career as a novelist and authority on the American west during the Revolution Controversy in London. His reinvented himself in print as a Jacobin philosopher and reformer who promoted a radical vision of social utopia in the western wilderness. Here Verhoeven shows his scholarly virtuosity seamlessly shifting research strategies to a painstaking history of the book methodology. The final section, recounts Imlay's sojourn in revolutionary France, where he joined many of his radical British cohorts in supporting the revolutionary cause. In Paris, Imlay plotted with the Girondists to retake Louisiana for the cause of the revolution, participated in dangerous but highly profitable blockade running with a clique of radical British and American merchants, and romanced Wollstonecraft. After the implosion of their relationship in 1796, Imlay's near-total disappearance from the historical record stumps even an intrepid researcher such as Verhoeven. He died in obscurity on the Island of Jersey in 1828.The chief payoff of Verhoeven's careful reconstruction of Imlay's life is that it brings a much-needed subtlety to interpretations of the founding generation. As Nancy Isenberg has recently pointed out in Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (New York, 2007), historians have tended to view the founders in stark moral terms and their political strug- gles as conflicts between good and evil. In Verhoeven's deft hands, a liminal figure like Imlay was both radical and revanchist, cultural critic and conman, patriot and profiteer - and never a hypocrite. …

John Brown, Terrorist?

Since the Oklahoma City bombing and the September 11th attack, historians have interpreted John Brown as an American terrorist. This article seeks to correct that misinterpretation and situate Brown within the context of guerrilla warfare. While Brown did employ terrorist tactics, this is a common guerrilla action. Further, Brown himself and his contemporaries saw him as a guerrilla fighting in the revolutionary cause of antislavery.

:Intimate Enemies: Demonizing the Bolshevik Opposition, 1918–1928.(Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies.)

This is Igal Halfin's third analysis of Bolshevik discourse, following From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (1999) and Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (2003). All three books are part of a growing body of scholarship that reasserts the centrality of ideology, in particular of what it meant to “speak Bolshevik,” to our understanding of Soviet history. Like the author's previous book, this work strives to identify the scope and development of what Halfin, in adapting Foucault, calls the “hermeneutics of the soul,” the process by which party members attempted to glean one another's state of consciousness and, ultimately, their true understanding of and underlying loyalty to the revolutionary cause. Halfin boldly asserts that previous accounts of the intraparty conflicts of the 1920s have failed to take seriously the intricate language battles that occurred and have mistakenly ascribed the course of events to (primarily cynical) personal antagonisms. He aims to transcend what he sees as “the reductive understanding of language widespread in current scholarship” (p. 28), although for the most part he does not name names.

The Trilling Files

The FBI dossier on Lionel Trilling discloses that the Bureau followed his activities intermittently for almost three decades. An active file was maintained on Trilling from the late 1930s to the mid-1960s. Most of these reports address Trilling’s peripheral connection to ongoing FBI probes and to its scrutiny of communist figures and issues, and reveal how out of touch FBI intelligence was about which American intellectuals posed security threats. Although Trilling’s FBI dossier contains no bombshell revelations and discloses no technical violations of his civil liberties, his surveillance by the FBI was wasteful and unnecessary; in any event, it demonstrates a skewed understanding of the balance among national security, social order, and personal liberty.

The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America (review)

The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America. By John Fea. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Pp. 280. Cloth, $39.95.)Reviewed by Will MackintoshThe subject of John Fea's new biography, Philip Vickers Fithian, is a man already well known to American historians for his insightful and detailed diary of life as a tutor on Robert Carter's plantation in Virginia in the mid-1770s. Fea removes Fithian from the narrow Virginian pigeonhole in which historians have placed him and replants him firmly in his native social and intellectual soil. The sensitivity of his account is a fitting complement to Fithian's unusually thoughtful and articulate diary, kept throughout his adult life.Fea begins with Fithian's childhood in the Cohansey region of southwestern New Jersey, where he was the oldest son of a Presbyterian yeoman farming family. He then follows Fithian through his religious conversion, his years Princeton and Nomini Hall, and his tours as itinerant preacher in the Appalachian backcountry. Throughout the book, Fea traces Fithian's romance with Elizabeth Beatty, and he ends with Fithian's growing political commitment to the Revolutionary cause and his service and death as a chaplain in the Revolutionary army. Fea's well-structured chapters weave together the social, intellectual, spiritual, and emotional aspects of Fithian's life in each of its discrete moments.This biography is more than just an explication of Fithian's remarkable diary and correspondence, however. Fea explains that his project is to use Fithian's life to illustrate a number of themes at the heart of the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century (5). For Fea, the Enlightenment is neither a grand historical abstraction nor the parlor game of a few European intellectuals; rather, it describes a particular path of selfimprovement that many in eighteenth-century America tried to tread. The Enlightenment is the way of improvement of which his title speaks, and for Fithian and his contemporaries it consisted of a fierce commitment to the use of reason to counteract destructive individual passions and to build a universal love of the human race that would supersede local and parochial concerns. Importantly, Fea points out that the rational commitments of the Enlightenment always existed side by side in America with deep Christian faith. These two traditions were sometimes odds, but were often complementary in their visions of personal and political improvement, especially for followers of Fithian's moderate mid- Atlantic Presbyterianism. Fea puts Fithian's skills as a diarist to good use in providing a clear and convincing explanation of these diverse building blocks of an early American worldview.Fea's biographical approach places his book the intersection of several different historiographies. His attention to the specifics of Fithian's experience puts his book in dialogue with other social histories of the Revolution like Alfred Young's The Shoemaker and the Tea Party (Boston, MA, 1999). Fithian was neither a leader nor a common soldier; rather, he was an exceptionally articulate member of the middling sorts, and as such, his story takes a first step toward connecting the historiography of the revolutionary experience with the historiography of the nineteenth-century middle class. …

Eisler's Notes on Hollywood and the Film Music Project, 1935-42

In 1947, Hanns Eisler in collaboration with Theodor Adorno published a small but important book entitled Composing for the Films. The book represents a significant contribution to film studies, cultural criticism, and the discipline of twentieth-century musical practice. It also provides one of the few extended historical texts from the 1940s that deconstructs musical practice while probing the wider theoretical implications of motion picture music. The gestation of Composing for the Films, however, remains controversial. (1) Although I shall treat this and the book's politically tangled publication history elsewhere, this article seeks to address one aspect of the book's intellectual foundation--that is, Eisler's theoretical and aesthetic notions about film music in relation to Hollywood's film industry. Eisler's direct exposure and reaction to musical practices began in 1935 during his first trip to the United States, and continued in 1938 when he returned as an emigre and embarked on the Film Music Project (1940-42, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation). Since 1927, Eisler had been deeply interested in film music. As a committed Marxist, he saw film as a powerful political device to educate the proletariat and serve the revolutionary cause. In contrast to the modernist bourgeois ideals of his teacher Arnold Schoenberg, Eisler believed that music should be democratized and provide social meaning to a mass public. (2) Film music offered an outlet for the practical realization of these ideals, and Eisler quickly established himself as a critic and composer in the field from the earliest development of sound film onward, and brought a specialized knowledge and commitment to its practice. He involved himself intensively as a film composer, exploiting a wide range of musical approaches and applying many of the theoretical and aesthetic concepts that he, as a politically motivated musician, cultivated within an array of genres from documentary to commercial productions. Consequently, by the time he arrived in the United States in 1938, he was already considered a European expert and had accumulated a great deal of experience as a critic on the subject. Hollywood Seen from the Left In May 1935, Eisler was invited by the English parliamentarian Lord Marley to present a series of lectures in the United States in support of the World Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism. (3) Organized in 1933 under the direction of Willi Munzenberg as a response to the burning of objectionable books in Germany and the suppression of intellectual activities by the Nazis, the Committee launched a propaganda campaign to appeal to a new constituency of socialist sympathizers worldwide. Munzenberg's control over this organization derived from his position as head of the Soviet Union's cultural propaganda apparatus abroad. His network of Communist Front organizations, including charities, publishing houses, newspapers, theaters, film studios, and cinema houses, attracted the participation of many illustrious intellectuals and artists like Eisler. For example, in 1934, Eisler and the playwright Bertolt Brecht published their Lieder, Gedichte, Chore with Editions du Carrefour, which had been a subsidiary of the Munzenberg Press since 1933. Eisler also wrote the score for Kuhle Wampe, a production of Munzenberg's Prometheus Films (McMeekin 2003:262-63; Betz 1982:121; Schoots 2000:79, 88). Munzenberg used popular media such as those described above to create bridges between the Soviet proletarian government and less doctrinaire Western socialists (McMeekin 2003:1). And by 1935, when the Soviet Union officially shifted its policy from a United to a more inclusive Popular Front agenda that would have wider appeal to socialist intellectuals and artists, anti-fascism became the common political concern, a shared rallying call. (4) Consequently, the activities of the World Committee and in particular Eisler's tour mustered international support for Communism by exposing the terrors of Fascism. …

Reinterpreting Revolutionary Russia: Essays in Honour of James D. White by Ian D. Thatcher (review)

reviews 561 incisive essay on the effect of defeat on tsarist foreign policy underlines the perceived imperative for a recueillement inRussia's external relations, but also shows how Russia's bureaucratic elite established a greater role for itself in the foreign policy-making process. Norman Saul's contribution on the peace talks inNew Hampshire charts their course, and isvery attuned to diplomatic nuances in examining the subtle changes that occurred in Russo-American relations startingwith the Portsmouth-Kittery talks. The translated chapters, in particular, would have benefited frommore careful copy-editing, which might easily have filtered out stylistic infelicities and grammatical and typographical errors. Although very nicely produced, and adorned with wonderful illustrations, at around ?130 each, the price for the two volumes isprohibitive. Overall, there can be no doubt as to the scholarly thoroughness and importance of the essays brought together in these two volumes. Scholars of the period will want to take note of them. Even so, a grain of doubt remains. Following Japan's victory in the war, a senior British diplomat comment ed that the rise of Japan had so upset the existing international order 'as a planet the size of Mars would derange the solar system'. The Russo-Japa neseWar was a regional conflictwith global ramifications, and itneeds to be seen in a global context. The essays reviewed here, excellent though they are, remain focused on the two antagonists on Mars, but pay little attention to the solar system. School of History T. G. Otte Universityof East Anglia Thatcher, Ian D. (ed.).Reinterpreting Revolutionary Russia: Essays in Honour of James D. White. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2006. vii + 219 pp. Notes. Index. ?45.00. Ian Thatcher has assembled an impressive collection of highly readable essays inhonour ofJames White. In his own Introduction, Thatcher highlights White's research on the Bolshevik seizure of power, which stressed that it was Trotskii's tactic of transferring power bloodlessly to the Soviets that triumphed, though Lenin's idea of an offensive on Petrograd dominated the historiography in order to preserve Lenin's primacy in the legend. On theTerror in 1905John Keep shows that itsobject of achieving po litical change succeeded only when strikes, riots and demonstrations forced the Tsar to concede reforms. Keep cites the revisionist view of terrorists as dangerous Utopians, often criminals in disguise, while he limits terrorism to 'violent individual or group action [. . .] designed to kill or harm per sons, rightly or wrongly, as members or supporters of an oppressive ruling establishment' (p. 22). The theme of Russian terrorism is continued in Jane McDermid's article on Mariya Spiridonova. Arrested for the assassination of a provincial governor, Spiridonova soon became a cause celebre when itwas reported that 562 SEER, 86, 3, JULY 2008 she had been beaten, tortured and sexually assaulted under interrogation. The idea of 'a beautiful young woman, determined to "sacrifice" her lifeon the altar of the revolutionary cause' (p. 37), and suffering torture as a result, was taken up as a sensation in the Western press, which was more indignant at her mistreatment than either her killing of the governor or the sentence of death, which was commuted to twentyyears in exile. Revisiting the work of Leopold Haimson and the question of whether World War One was fundamentally responsible for the demise of tsarism, David Saunders broadens his focus beyond the immediate pre-war years and intoprovincial industrial centres.His research on the impactmade byRussia's nineteenth-century wars on industrial labour leads him to conclude that it was not the intensification of pre-existing trends that ended tsarism,but rather the 'equilibrium-punctuating catastrophe' (p. 57) that was the war. Rex Wade questions the terminal date of the Russian revolution. After surveying the wide range that generations of historians have applied ? October itself,theCivil War, NEP, Lenin's death, and even 1937-38 and the Great Terror, Wade settles for the dispersal of the Constitutional Assembly inJanuary 1918, arguing persuasively that that event 'transformed a political struggle into a military struggle, revolution into civilwar' (p. 85). Analysing Trotskii's role in the civilwar, Geoffrey Swain argues that it was his application of 'thoroughly un-Bolshevik' (p. 86) principles of organiza...

Apocalyptic Religious Movements in American History

May/June 2008 · Historically Speaking 29 Apocalyptic Religious Movements in American History Stephen J. Stein Shakers number, America has been and remains a highly receptive environment for religious movements defined in some primary way by their apocalyptic messages. But the substance of those proclamations defies easy generalnation . The apocalyptic category derives from the Greek word att????????, meaning an "uncovering" or "revelation ." Apocalyptic religious movements seek to reveal or disclose that which is hidden. The primary focus of apocalyptic revelations tends to be the future or the supposed end of things. For that reason such movements usually are preoccupied with eschatological matters. Eschatology is literally concern with the "last tilings." Movements laying claim to apocalyptic insight often do so on the basis of special revelations or a unique understanding of sacred texts. Such movements in America are part of a long and rich tradition in religious history extending from ancient times to the present. America has been a fertile seedbed for such movements: some have been transplanted from abroad while others have grown out of circumstances on this continent. In the colonial era, many colonists who adopted an apocalyptic religious perspective were deeply influenced by European thinkers. Puritan ministers in New England, for example , knew the eschatological writings of English Reformation theologians who attempted to unlock prophetic mysteries in the Bible with special attention to the book of Revelation, i.e. 'The Apocalypse of St. John." They formulated ideas about the nature and timing of the millennium, the projected thousand-year personal reign of Christ on Earth that was to precede a final judgment; the identity of the Antichrist, the figure identified as the leader of the enemies of the true church; and the significance of "signs of the times," contemporary events construed as indications that the end of earthly days was fast approaching John Cotton (1584-1652), the first minister in the First Church of Boston, insisted that his congregation admit regenerate members only, a position related to his judgment that the millennium might begin in 1655. Three members of the distinguished Mather family—all Puritan ministers—employed apocalyptic reflections throughout their lifetimes. Richard Mather (1596-1669) viewed the English Civil War as potentially leading to the end of the Antichrist 's reign. Increase Mather (1639-1723) believed the return of Christ was imminent. Cotton Mather (1663-1728) was willing to set particular dates within his lifetime as the moment of Christ's return, predictions that ultimately failed to materialize and , 1830. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction LC-USZ62-13659]. therefore disappointed. Jonathan Edwards (17031758 ), a leader of the emergent evangelical movement , spent a lifetime studying the book of Revelation. On one occasion he implied that the millennium might begin in America. In 1793 his student and friend Samuel Hopkins (1721-1803), another evangelical minister, thought that the millennium might begin in another 200 years or so. Virtually all Protestant clergy at the time were persuaded that the Antichrist was the pope, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church. Anti-Catholicism was widespread, and the polemics between Protestants and Catholics made apocalyptic something more than ideology. Protestants also linked the figure of the Antichrist to other contemporary opponents . During King George's War (1744-48), an imperial struggle among European nations, many American Protestants viewed the conflict as an opportunity to defeat the forces of the Antichrist equated with the Catholic nations of France and Spain. Edwards declared the English victory at Cape Breton in Canada "a dispensation of providence, the most remarkable of its kind." Apocalyptic fervor provided ideological support for the Revolutionary cause during the American War for Independence. Samuel Sherwood (1703-1783), a Congregational minister in Connecticut, equated the beast in Revelation 13 with the British monarchy. Apocalyptic reflections were preached from pulpits and published in tracts and books. Eschatological ideas permeated Protestant circles, giving adherents a distinctive sense of place in the flow of world history. After 1790, the new American nation provided a supportive context for existing religious communities as well as new religious movements. The First Amendment of die Constitution prohibited religious establishment on the national level and supported free exercise of religion. As a result, religious communities enjoyed new opportunities...

Social Psychology and the Paradox of Revolution

According to the gunman theory, many revolutions do not take place, in spite of the fact that the majority stands to gain if they can put an end to the oppression exercised over it, since a gunman can see to it that egoistic individuals have no incentive to take part in revolution. Champions of the idea that there is a paradox of revolution go further: Even if individuals care about the common good, they will not take action. This is wrong. If they care about the common good, revolution will take place. This is good news. The bad news is, however, that those conditions we find in social psychological literature, which are helpful to the revolutionary cause, tend to be undennined by the oppressive system when it is well-functioning.

From Empire to Nation-State: Explaining Wars in the Modern World, 1816–2001

The existing quantitative literature on war takes the independent nation-state as the self-evident unit of analysis and largely excludes other political types from consideration. In contrast, the authors argue that the change in the institutional form of states is itself a major cause for war. The rise of empires and the global spread of the nation-state are the most important institutional transformations in the modern age. To test this hypothesis, the authors introduce a new data set that records the outbreak of war in fixed geographic territories from 1816 to 2001, independent of the political entity in control of a territory. Analysis of this data set demonstrates that wars are much more likely during and because of these two transformations. For the transformation to the modern nation-state, the authors confirm this hypothesis further with logit regressions that control for variables that have been robustly significant in previous research. The results provide support for the main mechanisms that explain this time dependency. Modern nation-states are ruled in the name of a nationally defined people, in contrast to empires, which govern to spread a faith across the world, to bring civilization to backward people, or to advance the world revolutionary cause. The institution of the nation-state thus introduces incentives for political elites to privilege members of the national majority over ethnic minorities, and for minority elites to mobilize against such political discrimination. The resulting power struggles over the ethno-national character of the state may escalate into civil wars. Interstate wars can result from attempts to protect co-nationals who are politically excluded in neighboring states. The reported research thus provides a corrective to mainstream approaches, which exclude ethnic and nationalist politics as factors that would help understanding the dynamics of war.

Theft and Counter-Theft: Joesph Plumb Martin's Revolutionary War

Theft and Counter-Theft:Joseph Plumb Martin's Revolutionary War Catherine Kaplan (bio) Joseph Plumb Martin's 1830 Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Dangers, and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier recounts few daring deeds. Despite long years of service, Martin only once mentions firing a gun. He disdains to parse battle strategy and only rarely extols the nobility of the Revolutionary cause. Instead, Martin portrays the Revolution as a time in which "gentlemen" officers abandoned their men and Americans sold dear the pathetic scraps of food on which their suffering soldiers had to rely. He argues that America committed outrageous thefts: during the Revolutionary era, it robbed soldiers of their just wages and of their virtue, and during the 1820s, it denied them respect and sought to deny them their pensions. Martin's Narrative is less a conventional war memoir than it is a bill—figurative and literal—for services rendered. Martin's Narrative has gone entirely unnoticed by literary scholars. Historians have viewed it as a straightforward series of autobiographical vignettes, useful in providing some insight into a soldier's experience in wartime.1 (Martin's memoir has in fact been published under the earnestly celebratory titles of Ordinary Courage and Private Yankee Doodle.) In reality, however, Martin's Narrative is a slippery and complex text that contains two entwined lines of argument. The first is that the veterans of the Revolution deserved the gratitude and the financial assistance of the nation. Congress had passed the Revolutionary War Pension Act in 1818, and Martin likely wrote his text in response to the criticism of that act that swept the country in the 1820s.2 Continental Army soldiers had been mistreated, Martin suggests in his Narrative, by being denied proper pay and equipment during their years of brave service. The nation must not betray them again in their dotage. Martin's second, more daring line of argument is that the Jacksonian-era commemorations of the Revolution as a time of collective self-sacrifice are delusional and destructive. America has not declined [End Page 515] into self-interest and greed, Martin insists throughout his Narrative, but rather has been conceived there. Martin, in short, wants to do more than claim pennies for old veterans. He links the violation of wartime economic contracts to a broader abrogation of political and social compacts in the new nation. He does so by crafting his memoir as a picaresque, a genre that credits the lowly rogue with a unique vantage point from which to criticize society. Martin's story of theft, economic exploitation, and moral corruption is a scathing and sorrowful critique of the Revolutionary era and the nation it created. Martin claims his authority as a social critic not in spite of but because of his lack of education, power, and money. "I never studied grammar an hour in my life," he writes; "when I ought to have been doing that, I was forced to be studying the rules and articles of war." In this passage, Martin is not really deflecting attention but rather demanding it; he reminds his reader that because the country—and the reader himself—has benefited from the wartime service that cost Martin his education, his debtors would do well not to criticize any grammatical errors Martin makes. But Martin is not finished: immediately after lulling his reader with his protestation of ignorance, he turns to demonstrating his mastery. "I never learned the rules of punctuation farther," he writes, "than just to assist in fixing a comma to the British depredations in the state of New York; a semicolon in New Jersey; a colon in Pennsylvania, and a final period in Virginia," and finally, pointedly, "a note of interrogation, why we were made to suffer so much in so good and just a cause" (xxv). Martin is ostensibly claiming that the country has robbed him of the skills he as author must have and that his countrymen owe him for those losses—but he is demonstrating the skills' possession even as he asserts their loss. Throughout his Narrative, Martin also reminds his reader that he relates only what he actually saw as a low-ranking soldier. "There were several...

Old Tales in a New Narrative: Rethinking the Story of Women and the American Revolution

In Revolutionary Mothers: Women in Struggle for America's Independence, Carol Berkin writes of women whose gentle outward appearance belies their daring revolutionary purposes. It is tempting to see such women as not only subjects of Berkin, but kindred spirits as well. In this slim and gracefully written work, Berkin takes on two daunting missions: to cure the gender amnesia that surrounds American and to story of Revolution and its aftermath with complexity it deserves (p. xi). In academic circles, of course, complexity of Revolutionary era and important roles of women and gender ideology will not come as news. Berkin, however, has different audience in mind: broader public who thinks of Revolution simply as a quaint and harmless war (p. ix). That Berkin seems likely to succeed in reaching and educating that broader audience is result of one other ambitious purpose of her scholarship: to prove that it is possible to tell complicated story which is also ripping good yarn. By writing women into era, Berkin is not seeking to disrupt conventional periodization; way in which she begins her account-The year was 1765 and in halls of colonial legislatures from Massachusetts to Carolinas, colonial leaders rose to protest disturbing signs that their rights as Englishmen were being threatened -could come from Revolution chapter of any well-written textbook in land (p. 12). And despite fact that her focus on women draws her outside the halls of colonial legislatures, Berkin is not interested in portraying causes of Revolution as anything other than conventionally political. Instead, Berkin's contribution in her opening chapters is to describe, in short and evocative vignettes, women's participation in well-known boycotts and civic actions of immediate pre-Revolutionary era. Drawing on work of scholars such as Mary Beth Norton, Berkin argues

Still life and moving death in Flaubert's L'Éducation sentimentale

In typical, pseudo-Balzacian fashion, the last chapter of L’Education sentimentale ties up the loose ends concerning the many secondary characters still alive by the novel’s conclusion. At best, these desultory details sketch a set of rather banal and unsentimental lives, as it were to preface those of the main protagonists, Frederic and Deslauriers, whose shared memories, including their visit to la Turque, bring them together full circle to the full stop of the text. It is then not surprising that little critical attention has been paid to the final details of the many secondary lives recorded here, but might these be deceptive in their effacement before the centre stage is given once more to Frederic and Deslauriers? Might the primary position of secondary characters in the chapter constitute some further comparative or contrastive backing track to the grand themes and narratives of the novel, the making of love and history? Given the intensity and tension of the pseudo tragic parting of Mme Arnoux and Frederic in the famous penultimate ending of the novel, the bathos and matter-of-factness of the final chapter bring the text and reader back to the humdrum. Two running threads, however, are immediately striking. The first is the singular lack of any really colourful male character. Those who have played any significant part in the events of 1848 are already spectacularly dead, just as their deaths are spectacles: Dussardier’s ‘heroic’ death for the revolutionary cause and Dambreuse’s funeral in all its pomp and circumstance provided two key examples contrasting the orders of political ideas and financial power which were the conflicting dynamics of the revolution and also the novel itself. The only missing link, one directly connecting the penultimate chapter and its ending to this finale, is Arnoux. His death, announced simply by the words ‘Mort l’annee derniere’, is the afterthought to Frederic’s (last) account of Mme Arnoux in the novel (Flaubert, 162).

Peasants, Choice, and Civil Wars

Caught in the Crossfire: Revolutions, Repression, and the Rational Peasant. By T. David Mason. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Litttlefield Publishers, 2004. 328 pp., $78.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-7425-2538-4), $30.95 paper (ISBN: 0-7425-2539-2). David Mason has been a pioneer in the systematic study of civil wars (Mason 1984; Mason and Krane 1989; Mason and Fett 1996; Mason, Weingarten, and Fett 1999). Caught in the Crossfire: Revolutions, Repression, and the Rational Peasant reflects that experience. As Mason says, it draws several important and different research traditions together: classical theories of the causes of revolutions, dependency theory, rational choice analysis of why individuals participate in revolts, social movement theory, analysis of state response to large-scale social violence, democratization, globalization, war termination, and peacemaking. The theoretical analysis is supported and illustrated by two very good case studies. The result is an impressive and very well written book that could serve as a text for graduate or undergraduate courses. The central argument of Caught in the Crossfire is straightforward. To understand civil wars in the Third World, we need to focus on the behavior of peasants, whose choices shape these conflicts. Economic inequality by itself does not produce revolution, but the local effects of globalization—in particular the shift from subsistence to export agriculture—does. One response to this shift is to mobilize peasants to participate in nonviolent protests of various sorts. These protests generally rely on pre-existing social networks, which is one reason why ethnicity plays a significant part in such conflicts. They also use strategies already in the cultural repertoire of the peasants. The key question is how the government will respond to these protests. Mason explains why governments that are dominated by elites and that have few resources but face enormous needs so often see violence as the best, or indeed the …

Haydee Santamaria, and: Marianas in Combat: Tete Puebla and the Mariana Grajales Women's Platoon in Cuba's Revolutionary War, 1956-58 (review)

Betsy Maclean, ed. Haydee Santamaria. New York: Ocean Press, 2003; and Mary-Alice Waters, ed. Marianas in Combat: Tete Puebla and the Mariana Grajales Women's Platoon in Cuba's Revolutionary War, 1956-58. New York: Pathfinder Press, 2003.101 pp.Before Cuba's national pantheon of revolutionary heroes and heroines became powerful government officials and international icons, they were a diverse group of exceptionally motivated young people determined to make a change. The romance of the early revolutionary years is undeniable and continues to captivate scholars and students alike. While the exhaustive documentation of the triumphs and tribulations of Cuba's male heroes is a perennial favorite among Hollywood movie moguls and blockbuster publishing houses, considerably less attention has been given to the Cuban women who made the fateful decision to take up arms. Two new biographies of highly accomplished Cuban women who remain relatively unknown internationally take us one step further in the process of building up a history of women's revolutionary experiences. Both Haydee Santamaria and Tete Puebla offer unique insights into the Cuban revolution and postrevolutionary society from their perspective as women and as key contributors to the process that radically altered the trajectory of their nation's history.In her concise edited volume, Haydee Santamaria, Betsy Maclean weaves together a tapestry of memory texts - interviews, poetry, speeches, and personal correspondence - that shed light on one of Cuba's most beloved and enigmatic revolutionary heroines. Following a brief introduction in which Maclean traces the general trajectory of Haydee Santamaria's life from her birth in 1922 to her tragic suicide in 1980, the reader enters a two-part discussion of her specific contributions to the revolutionary cause. Bearing the evocative titles Fire and Light, the book's two sections consist of interviews with Santamaria and testimony from those who knew her best. With her signature humility, Santamaria recounts the multiple roles she played in the revolution from printing and distributing the revolutionary movement's first ideological platform, History Will Absolve Me, to establishing the preeminent Latin American cultural institution, the Casa de las Americas. Though she openly embraced her official state responsibilities as a member of the National Directorate of the United Party of the Socialist Revolution, Santamaria was perhaps most proud of her role as an indefatigable promoter of Cuban writers, artists, and musicians like famed Nueva Trova singer, Silvio Rodriguez. To her companeros and admirers, Yeye was a woman of exceptional warmth and revolutionary conviction who lived at the crossroads of poetry and pragmatism, hope and sorrow, life and death. Santamaria's tragic suicide - precipitated by the violent murder of her brother in 1953 and later amplified by a devastating car accident that left her in chronic pain during her final years -has been particularly difficult for many Cubans to assimilate into her heroic life story. Maclean and her collaborators address the lingering sorrow surrounding Santamaria's untimely death with great sensitivity and respect. Despite a regrettable lack of visual materials - Maclean provides only a brief chronology of key events discussed in the text - students will connect to this compelling story of a woman who stands as a perpetual reminder of the youthful idealism and enduring dedication of Cuba's revolutionary vanguard. …